CS 417 Old exams

This page contains previous exams that I have given in Distributed Systems classes of yore. You'll find the index of exams on the left sidebar.

About exams

All exams are closed book, closed notes exams.

Keep your answers short but accurate (a few sentances or a short paragraph, as necessary). I will not have the patience to read long essays and you will lose points even if you have some of the right information. Conversely, make sure that your answers are precise and accurate. For example, do not give answers such as
"we use QFS because it's more efficient".
Instead qualify it as
"QFS is used in this case because it's more efficient in its use of network resources. Each transaction requires an exchange of two messages and data is cached locally, whereas TFS requires a multi-message authentication sequence for each transaction and no local caching is performed".
Do not turn an answer into an essay:
"QFS, developed at the University of Southern North Dakota, comprises two client processes, a name server, and a storage server....".

To give you an idea of the style of questions you might expect, I am posting the past exams that I have given in this course. Use the contents on the left to select exams.

Spring 2008 Exam 1 Exam 2 Exam 3
Fall 2007 Exam 1 Exam 2 Exam 3
Spring 2007 Exam 1 Exam 2 Exam 3
Fall 2006 Exam 1 Exam 2 Exam 3
Spring 2006 Exam 1 Exam 2 Exam 3
Fall 2005 Exam 1 Exam 2 Exam 3
Spring 2005 Exam 1 Exam 2 Exam 3